What is Meeting Notes? - Guide

Meeting notes serve as a personal or team reference for what happened during a meeting. They typically include the topics discussed, ideas raised, concerns expressed, decisions made, and tasks assigned. While meeting minutes follow a formal structure, meeting notes are more flexible and can be adapted to whatever format works best for the team.

Effective meeting notes balance completeness with readability. Capturing every word spoken is unnecessary and makes the notes difficult to scan. Instead, good notes focus on key points, decisions, and next steps. Many teams use a simple template with sections for agenda items, discussion highlights, decisions, and action items with owners.

AI tools have made meeting notes significantly easier to produce. Rather than designating someone to take notes (and therefore not fully participate), teams can use tools like Notella to record the meeting and automatically generate structured notes. The AI identifies key discussion points, extracts action items, and produces a shareable summary that all attendees can reference.